MONGOLIAN

This weekend I was driving on Rt. 303 in Rockland County and saw 2 Mongolian restaurants. Can anyone tell me about this cuisine. I have noticed some Mongolian places driving around LA (Jonathan Gold can you enlighten me?).

Also on the same road a saw an interesting looking Filipino (sp?) place.

Don't get your hopes up. They are unlikely to serve kumiss (fermented mare's milk -- some say it is similar to Bailey's irish Cream!).

There are even some 'Mongolian' places in the city, where they are usually attached to salad bars, and are sort of stir-fry or griddle bars. You get an assortment of meats , veggies and condiments, and give them to a cook to stir/griddle fry for you. The places I have seen charge by weight, but there may be fixed-price or all-you-can-eat places as well.

These places probably don't have much to do with Mongolian food, whatever that is, but are distant descendents of Mongolian barbeque, a Korean like cook at the table dish from Northern China.

Restaurants advertising ``Mongolian''food are indeed more than apt to serve ``Mongolian BBQ,'' which bears about as muchrelation to actual Mongolian cooking as Belgianwaffles do to the breakfast spots of Bruges.

There are a few restaurants in L.A. serving some Mongolian dishes--not the fermented mare'smilk--but they tend to call themselves ``northern''Chinese or Islamic Chinese. Some of the Islamicdishes, the lamb warm pots, the griddle-bakedscallion bread, the pita-like sandwiches ofmarinated beef, are extraordinary; some of theothers, like the dried lamb compressed into loaves and deep-fried, is ... er ... authentic.

The best of several Islamic Chinese places(undoubtedly incorporating some Mongolian specialties), is Tung Lai Shun, in the Chinese megamall at 145 W. Valley in the eastern suburb San Gabriel.

Until it moved here a couple of years ago,the restaurant was for 100 years one of themost popular places in Beijing, and while itscosmopolitan and quite wonderful versionsof Mongolian lamb, braised lamb with garlic,chunky lamb dumplings and lamb warm pot withcabbage may resemble a Beijing guy's fantasy of the food more than it does the stuff itself.

Another restaurant, recently closed, used toserve weird, gamy jerky-like things that didseem to resemble stuff that Chinese nomadsmight reasonably be expected to pack for lunchon the steppes, and when I brought some of itto a colleague who specialized in the historyof medieval Central Asian food, he took one bite,spat it into a wastebasket, and said, ``Undoubtedly authentic.''